


Them to Fulfill, O Soul

by whatthedubbs



Series: O My Brave Soul, O Farther Sail [2]
Category: Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Wonder Woman (Comics)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amazon!Jason Todd, Backstory, Gen, I tried to make Willis more complex than just 'bad dad #1', References to Depression, VERY VERY BRIEF DISCUSSSIONS OF THE MENTAL HEALTH ISSUES ASSOSCIATED WITH FUNCTIONAL IMMORTALITY, mentions of sexual harassment of minors, unexpected changes assosciated with getting a new body
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 08:04:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21133412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatthedubbs/pseuds/whatthedubbs
Summary: Having a new body comes with some unexpected consequences.--Five things about Jason that change when he becomes Diana's son.





	Them to Fulfill, O Soul

**Author's Note:**

> So this was born of discarded snippets from the first work in the series; mostly little details that I couldn't find a way to fit in with the flow of the narrative. Some of them arose out of things people said in the comments as well.

**Food.**  
  
Jason never liked olives growing up.  
  
Oh, he’d tried. Mom had loved them; on their own or as a topping. There was always a jar of pickled olives in the fridge growing up, he remembers. Black ones, generally, since they were smaller and you got more by weight.   
  
Catherine thought they were delicious. Jason thought they tased sad and bitter, and the oil in them made other things taste weird for hours afterwards. He’d still bought them, though. Right up until the end. Had still had the last jar of them he’d bought for her stashed in the back of his dresser drawer at Wayne Manor when he’d gone to Ethiopia to be blown up.  
  
(She’d been dead when he got back from the grocery store, and the jar remained unopened).  
  
—  
  
Bruce had been neutral about them. Olives were to be expected in martinis and on hors d’oeuvres and some salads. Perhaps in a bowl with toothpicks on the buffet table at galas.  
  
The olives at Wayne Manor tended to be the green ones. Larger, firmer. Somehow even _more_ bitter and salty.   
  
—  
  
Alfred had noticed his dislike the first time Jason ate one in his presence. He’d tried to hide it; but even two months in to his stay at Wayne Manor it was obvious that Alfred was _probably_ more observant than Batman.  
  
(Sometimes Jason wonders if Alfred was Batman _before_ Bruce and was just too subtle and efficient to ever be noticed).  
  
He was very careful to keep a straight face even as bitter salt and oil burst over his tongue, but Alfred had just tutted and studiously kept olives off Jason’s plate in the future.  
  
—  
  
Jason is well aware of his tastes when he sits down to his first meal in his new (smooth, strong, unscarred) body at Queen Hippolyta’s table. He’s also aware that he’s in a pocket dimension that resembles ancient Greece, and that escaping olives will be impossible.  
  
His surprise when he bites into the first one causes Donna to snort wine out of her nose.  
  
It tastes _good!_

* * *

**Flight.**  
  
Bruce taught Jason to fly when he was thirteen.  
  
Dick had started earlier than that on the trapeze equipment in the cave; but nothing compared to the rush of swinging between the skyscrapers in the financial district.  
  
(And if Jason had taken particular care to leave muddy footprints on the sparkling-clean windows of executive offices then that was nobody’s business but his own).  
  
Flying is part of the magic of being _Batman and Robin_, and it leaves him giddy with adrenaline and the desire to _move_.   
  
Jason understands now why Dick is always fidgeting. He grew up doing this _every day_ for _years_. Lucky bastard.  
  
Jason loves it enough that he begs Dick to teach him some of his flashier moves just so he can spend a little more time flying. He sometimes wonders how good he would have gotten if the Joker hadn’t decided it was time to start murdering children.  
  
—  
  
The Red Hood flies out of necessity. Security cameras don’t point _up_, after all.   
  
The grapnel gun he makes himself is nowhere near strong enough to pull off the tricks he did as Robin with as much as he’s grown since he died.   
  
The pit takes up too much space in his head for him to really miss it, anyway.  
  
—  
  
Jason furiously brushes plaster dust out of his hair and glares at Donna as she laughs at him from below. He kicks petulantly at her hand when she reaches up to grab him by the ankle and drag him back to earth.  
  
_“Come on, little brother! Get down from there! You’re leaving holes in the ceiling!”_  
  
So he somehow forgot that Amazons can fly. So what?  
  
(Jason looks up at the dent he made in the ceiling and winces when he sees the blemish he’d left in the expansive mural of the life of Hera that’s painted up there).  
  
Flying under his own power isn’t as much of a _rush_ as flying with gravity and a strong line. It’s more like a _release_.  
  
Kick off from the ground with the right intent and gravity just forgets he’s there. Donna gets great enjoyment dragging him around by a string attached to his ankle while he gets used to it.  
  
It takes six months of practicing before he figures out how to turn it off at the top of a swooping arc and flip through the air like Dick taught him.   
  
It’s still not quite the same.

* * *

**Clothing.**  
  
Jason’s learned from a young age that uncovered skin is an _invitation_.   
  
The working girls on the corner explain it to him before he’s six. He learns the truth of it at seven when one of Willis’ poker buddies catches him in the hall between his room and the bathroom one night.  
  
Willis puts the guy’s head through the living room window and Jason never sees him again; but he can still feel the phantom grip on his thigh for months afterwards. He never buys another pair of shorts after that.  
  
—  
  
Ten years old and on the street and it’s even more important to be covered at all times. Jason keeps a ratty old scarf wrapped around his face every time he leaves his hidey-hole in the back room of the abandoned warehouse on 153rd street. The working girls tell him his face is too pretty, and he knows by now what they mean.   
  
—  
  
Jason refuses to wear the Robin uniform until Bruce doubles the voltage in the anti-removal catches. And triples the complexity of the disarming mechanism.   
  
Every time a crook leers at him he hates Dick’s exhibitionist streak a little more. At least Bruce lets him have a longer cape.  
  
—  
  
The Red Hood is covered from head to toe in boby-traped body armor. Jason doesn’t feel _safe_ inside it all; but that’s for reasons entirely unrelated to how much of his skin is showing.  
  
—  
  
When he wakes up by the banks of the Styx he’s a little surprised at how little it bothers him to be wearing little more than a few yards of linen and a rope. He looks down at himself, at clear tan skin, unmarred for the first time in nearly a decade and wonders if his life would have made more sense if he’d decided to be a model instead of a vigilante.   
  
Maybe.  
  
He’s got the thighs for it.  
  
—  
  
No matter how many times Donna assures him she consulted the measurements the doctors at Arkham made when he was first admitted, Jason is convinced that she exaggerated when helping Grandma Hippolyta sculpt his new body.  
  
He’s also beginning to wonder if Diana’s costume has more to do with her Amazonian heritage than people realize, because suddenly it’s like he doesn’t care that he’s not completely covered at all times.  
  
He wonders if it’s just a side-effect of invulnerability, but it can’t be _that_. Look at Clark. Sure, the man wears his underwear on the outside of his costume; but he’s also covered from toe to neck.   
  
The costume concepts that Diana and Donna show him are… considerably more revealing.  
  
Jason’s surprised that he finds them _tempting_.  
  
Maybe it’s because after twenty years and two deaths he’s finally got the opportunity to take his former weakness and turn it into a _weapon_. Donna’s never been shy about using sexuality like that, although only in the most passive of ways. Selina, on the other hand…  
  
Well, he can’t _actually_ remember ever hearing about her getting hurt.  
  
And it’s not like he has to worry about covering up his scars anymore.  


* * *

**Mentality**  
  
Jason has been aware of the pitfalls of the mind since before the first time Catherine Todd chose the needle over a day at the park. He avoids them as much as he can growing up, although anxiety always seems to find the cracks in his armor.  
  
Sometimes he wonders if he would have been benched for depression if Garzonas hadn’t pitched himself off that balcony. Would that have been better or worse than the pit madness, he wonders.  
  
Maybe getting therapy and medication would have been better than the uncertainty that hung like a cloud over every moment he wasn’t flying across Gotham’s skyline. It might have been.   
  
It doesn’t matter now.  
  
—  
  
After the pit there isn’t really _time_ to be depressed. The flames in the back of his mind drive him onward when the rest of him wants to just lie down and do nothing until he feels more real.   
  
The pit, he thinks, is nothing like Bruce’s theories. It doesn’t really heal the things that are broken, just paints over them with enough green fire and rage that they can’t matter to you anymore.   
  
On days where the flames don’t rage quite as high he wonders if he’ll slip into a walking coma again if they go out.  
  
Perhaps that would be better.  
  
—  
  
Everything is muted by the Styx. There but not; like himself.  
  
—  
  
When he wakes up in his new body his mind feels… clearer. Lighter.  
  
Everything is still there; memories all accounted for. The irresistible urge to tug on the ends of his hair when he’s thinking. The way he can’t help but make literary references every other breath.   
  
But behind all that it’s… quiet. No niggling doubts about his place with Diana, none of the stupor born of the early stages of depression. No little voice listing all the ways in which things are going to go wrong.  
  
Diana explains that the minds of Amazons do not have the same failings as the minds of humans. Neurologically they are quite different, largely an adaptation caused by their functional immortality. How else, she asks, is one to go on for thousands of years while mortals come and go so quickly?  
  
Jason tries not to think too much about it. How many people has Diana loved and lost in _her_ lifetime?  
  
What does it mean that of all of them, _Jason_ was the one she brought back from the banks of the Styx?

* * *

**Language.**  
  
Jasons’s first words are in English, but he’s speaking both English and Spanish by the time he’s starting school.  
  
Catherine speaks Spanish to him when they’re home alone. Never when Willis is around.  
  
(It’s rude, she tells him, to speak a language not everyone in the room speaks when you know one they do).  
  
Then Willis is gone, and it’s Spanish at home and English at school. And a few broken words in Chinese to Mrs. Wong next door if he sees her in between.   
  
When Catherine turns to the needle there’s less Spanish at home and more silence. Until less becomes none, and the streets become his home.  
  
—  
  
Bruce learns Jason has a knack for languages and gets him tutors in any one he wants to learn. French and German and Latin and Russian. Dick gives him a few phrases in Romani, but there isn’t much literature to go with it so it doesn’t hold his attention well.  
  
—  
  
He’s just picking up Arabic when he dies at fifteen. He learns it later, from Talia.  
  
She won’t bring him the works of the Sufists, but it’s okay. He’s read translations.   
  
—  
  
Jason doesn’t realize that his new body speaks ancient greek until he sees the look of utter bafflement on the cab-driver’s face when he asks for a ride to Wayne Manor. It takes a conscious effort to revert to English, and when he manages it he’s relieved to learn he still speaks it like he grew up in Park Row.   
  
The cabbie is probably mildly suspicious.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not quite as happy with this one as I was with the first work in this series; I think partly because it lacks dialogue. However, there were things about Jason's third life that I felt needed clarification in light of people's reaction to 'Then We Burst Forth, We Float in Time and Space.'
> 
> The first (and most important) thing, is that Jason isn't automatically healed by becoming an Amazon. He hasn't necessarily moved on. While I've made the decision that in this AU Amazonian neurology actively defeats things like depression and anxiety, there's still a lot of regret and non-pit-fueled anger that Jason has to deal with. He's suddenly faced with the existential nightmare that he's going to outlive 98% of everyone he's ever known (I'm assuming Diana is around 3000 years old in this AU). His body has different tastes than his old one, and the neurological pathways he'd developed over the course of twenty years don't exist in his new brain, even if it's got his consciousness.
> 
> Also powers, although I can see Jason enjoying them.


End file.
